Two suns are better than one

Astronomers call it a circumbinary planet; Star Wars fans are calling it Tatooine, after the Skywalkers’ home planet. SETI Institute researchers, using data from Nasa’s Kepler space telescope, found a planet about 200 light-years from Earth that is orbiting two stars – the first of its kind confirmed. Periodic dips in the stars’ brightness allowed astronomers to calculate that a planet about the size of Saturn completes an orbit of the two-star system every 229 days.